Selection and grouping
Marquee selection, parent attachments, and group-level actions – how to act on more than one object at a time.
Three patterns for selecting more than one object: marquee select for a freeform set, parent attachments for hierarchical groups, and the Scene Outliner for surgical multi-select. Each one is the right answer in a different situation.
What it does
A scene with one object is rare. Most real work happens on groups: a coffee-table setup with chairs around it, the props on a desk, the soldiers on a ship's deck. Picking each one separately and applying the same transform every time wastes minutes per session. The selection patterns below let you treat groups as one.
Marquee select
Use marquee for freeform multi-selection that doesn't need to persist across sessions.
Click the marquee icon in the toolbar (single-point cursor with a dashed rectangle).
Drag a selection box across the viewport. Anything fully or partially inside the box becomes selected.
Apply a transform, swap, color change, or save-as-set to the entire selection.
Parent attachments
Drag one object onto another in the Scene Outliner to parent it. The child inherits the parent's position, rotation, and scale – move the parent and the child comes along.
Use parent attachments when:
You're putting characters on a moving vehicle and want them to stay aboard.
You're attaching props to a hand or a body part.
You're building a rig where the secondary parts should always follow the primary.
The webinar pirate-scene walkthrough uses parent attachments heavily: each pirate is parented to the gallion, each soldier to the frigate. Move the boat, the crew comes with it.
To unparent: drag the child out to the root level in the Scene Outliner, or right-click the row and pick Detach.
Selecting from the Scene Outliner
When you need to pick a specific group of objects by name (everything called "tree" but not "fern", or every character but not their props), the Scene Outliner is the right tool. Hold Shift and click row-by-row, or Shift+click from row A to row B for contiguous selections. The viewport selection updates live.
Group actions
Once a multi-selection is active, the contextual menu shows only the actions that work on the whole group:
Move / rotate / scale
Applies to every object's transform
Color
Applies to every object whose material accepts color
Save as set
Groups them into a reusable set, keeping their relative positions. See Sets.
Lock
Locks every object in the selection
Delete
Deletes every object in the selection
Swap is not a group action – it operates on one object at a time. To swap multiple objects to the same alternative, do it one at a time.
Limits and known issues
Marquee doesn't include hidden objects. If something is hidden via the Scene Outliner's eye toggle, the marquee skips it.
Locked objects can't be marqueed. Lock blocks selection from any pathway, including the marquee box.
Parent-child scale interactions. If a parent's scale is non-uniform, child positions can drift unexpectedly. Use uniform scales on parents wherever you can.
Related
Last updated
Was this helpful?